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Does Windows SP2 With ODF Support Really Work? Test Results Point to No.

By Pamela Jones et al.

I tried the updated Windows Office 2007 SP2, which supports ODF, or says it does. I created a document in Office 2007 SP2 and saved it as ODF. I got an ominous Microsoft warning that if I persisted, I might lose some formatting -- "Document [name] may contain features that are not compatible with this format. Do you want to continue to save in this format?" -- but it saved the document when I clicked Yes. I reasoned that OpenOffice, which I intended to use to test the result, does have the features I wanted. I had included one footnote, a photo, and a text block, all of which OpenOffice can do, but when I opened the saved document in OpenOffice, none of it looked right. You couldn't read the footnote at all, because it's cut horizontally in the middle of the text. You can see it's there, but you can't make out the words.

I thought most of the problems, and there were others, might be my fault though, because I've never used Office 2007 before, since I don't own it, and I found it very confusing. Because I don't own Office 2007, and I had limited access time to test on someone else's, I looked around to see if anyone else was reporting results in the new SP2. I asked Groklaw members if they had tried it out yet and how it worked for them. A Groklaw member, Dobbo, did a test working on a spreadsheet with a client, and his experience was also a failure.

It turns out Rob Weir also did some tests of spreadsheets, and it's not just me and Dobbo, and it's not just Word documents. If you are a government trying to decide if now's the time to adopt OOXML, because ODF is now allegedly supported, you probably want to read his Update on ODF Spreadsheet Interoperability. He compares all the options, which he tested a couple of months ago, OpenOffice, Google Docs, Clever Age, Sun's plugin, KSpread and Symphony, adds in the new Office 2007 SP2, and makes the comparison. I think it's fair to say that SP2 does worse than any of the others, or at best they fail equally in some categories. Clever Age actually did better on the tests than Office 2007 SP2. Why? What could possibly explain that?

Full post as published by Groklaw on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).